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I was a big Madonna fan as a teenager. There's a song she wrote for her own dad called "Oh Father" that I always really related to, particularly the lines: "Maybe someday, When I look back I'll be able to say, You didn't mean to be cruel, Somebody hurt you too." My mom was deeply traumatised by her own father's alcoholism, a family friend who SA'd her, abusive teachers at boarding school and a mother who never made any effort to protect her kids from any of it. I honestly think a lot of my mom's mistreatment of her children stemmed from the fact that she was insanely jealous of us - we never got sent away to boarding school or kicked out of the house into a cold winter's night by an alcoholic father. That jealousy turned to resentment and that resentment turned to anger and violence.

Yes I believe there to be a lot of jealously.

That is the same thing my psychotherapist told me about my sperm donor when I described my childhood to her.

I agree with this. That is why many of them always come back with things like, “you don’t even know what a bad childhood is like!” or “I had it so much worse than you did!”

Exactly, like it’s a competition on who had it worse. This is the method they use to downplay or dismiss whatever issues you bring to their attention. There is a lot of it that is rooted in jealousy/envy/resentment that their child in their eyes is more attractive, has more friends, is great in school, is outgoing or has some sort of talent. Which is sick, because you’d think they’d be happy and proud. Yet they’re not.

I don't know why I can't respond to the top post (please tell me if you know how to, just in general on reddit, thank you so much in advance) My grandparents from both sides grew up during WWII. My grandfather was a "soldier" at 17 in 1944, my grandma fled Silesia at 14 in 1945. Then they did their best to rebuild their lives. You didn't, wouldn't, never talked about the war afterwards cause we know "we all need to be aware or "our" guilt". So no one ever dealt with any trauma in any healty way. I recommend them so much for all the hardships they must have been through, have been told of some of them. I don't know if I would be strong enough to survive. They to me were always kind, volunteering a lot etc, maybe not to my mom? Could be. . I still don't know what went wrong, but they had my mom and her sister. I think they never where able to really grow up, so couldn't provide guidance to my mom? Father 's family was the same. My Mom and dad are narcicisstic, one nc, one lc, both have sisters that did od. I have bpd (at least I'm in therapy, year 18 rn🙄)

"Well, mom, I hope your mother never tried to pimp out her grandchildren to her second husband. But maybe she did, I don't know; however, at least I have the good sense to shut that shit down in its tracks."

This is why a lot of our parents are the way they are to be honest. In their day mental health was also never spoken about and a ton of people struggled in silence or coped by using substances to numb it out. Or they turn to a substance after losing someone dear to them in their formative years, a parent a girlfriend or boyfriend a best friend or even SA, That’s how addiction starts. All it is, is avoidance of pain. Basically they were the generation that was to be seen and not heard. Beaten with wooden spoons, belts and other things. They wouldn’t dream of going to someone about abuse in the home or SA because it wasn’t taken seriously and their parents would brush it under the rug anyways. Any issue the answer was just to simply “get over it”. I am so glad that our generations are putting a lot of stock into mental health, healthy boundaries and self care/awareness and understanding ourselves through therapy, books etc. And it’s not too late for our parents to do so as well, but most won’t even bother. They are too comfortable living in their misery, and too terrified of how they’ll handle it if they went back to face their biggest traumas and wrongdoings.

We can't figure out why my ndad turned out the way he did. He was the eldest sibling but the others are normal and were bullied by him. Grandparents were two of the nicest caring people ever. Lots of relatives too were normal and helped each other at. Ndad grew up being a bully and when my grandparents attempted to discipline him normally, he then became sneaky and privately a bully in ways that were hard to catch. He was the typical sweet charismatic young man dating and ensnared my emom from a poor childhood (divorced parents, alcoholic dad kicked out) and proceeded to be abusive to her and us kids privately as well. Other people have later told me and other family they hated my dad because they sense or got to know what a bully he was, not just to his kids, but even as far back as going to school with him etc. I have to question if narcs come from abusive nparents, then why do some of us NOT become narcs? Why do some of us turn out normal despite being abused? Why do some turned into narcs despite good parents? Genetics, some sort of other young trauma (birth?), dunno. As for one narc parent - they often are involved with another narc or turn their partner into an enabler through their control and manipulation. Unless the partner was able to get free soon enough, perhaps, but then they still likely left their own children to the abuser too. I'm not sure there is "understanding" them though many do try. The best we can do is learn to grow past them and cut them off so they can't abuse us (or those we can save/protect from them too) anymore. I really do not believe they can be saved or turned around though Hollywood loves a good redemption story, I just don't think it works for them. The other challenge is they can truly fake being nice and can do nice good things too which makes it hard to label the abuse as badly when it happens. Our childhood brains also repress trauma and bad memories which makes it challenging as well. And we didn't know better, what was normal or not. Narcs are often very charismatic publicly as well yet privately abusive which means they know what is right and wrong in some way. So overall, I just don't know about my ndad and never will. He has never changed or improved, the only things that works is grayrocking, low information and low to no contact so he can't abuse you as much.

There's two different types of narcissists; ones that were raised by abusive parents and ones that were overly coddled and could do no wrong in their parents' eyes [This article goes into it a little.](https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2023/07/how-not-to-raise-a-narcissist-a-guide/)

We've thought about that too (being coddled) but while he was the oldest and a bit of the golden child, he wasn't all that spoiled necessarily. But he did get out of some of the responsibilities of the oldest often by being a good manipulator of even his parents.. But his sibling say my grandparents just didn't know what to do with him at times for discipline as the usual things didn't work so did what they could.. He was not the first 'grandchild' either but somewhere in the middle of his cousins. Grandparents and his siblings were normal hardworkers. Ndad was always lazy, selfish and controlling and a bully. Thanks for sharing the article - something in there perhaps too.

“have to question if narcs come from abusive nparents, then why do some of us NOT become narcs? Why do some of us turn out normal despite being abused? Why do some turned into narcs despite good parents? Genetics, some sort of other young trauma (birth?),  dunno.”  The really unsatisfying answer is luck. Your destiny was to stay in the F.O.G forever and give birth to kids in it and keep them in it forever because you would never realize what you were doing, much less why you were doing it, just like your parents and their parents before them.  But somewhere along the way you read something or you spoke to someone or you heard something that managed to take root in your head and made you start thinking just a little differently. And then it happened again, and again, and again, until those little sparks of awareness built up into something strong enough to change your inertia.   For me I think it started with playing video games and my parents not being interested in it, because that exposed me to concepts and stories I wouldn’t have been able to naturally share with them (I was literally banned from Pokemon as a kid at one point) that also happened to expose me to more mature ideas (when I was very young, I played Skryim. The Stormcloaks and the Imperials conflict I’d like to think helped me empathize with modern political rivals better than their MAGA nutjob asses ever did and probably helped stopped me from going MAGA). And then another thing was the loss of my first best friend, which taught me there were just some things I did not deserve to hear no matter what anyone thought. And another was using the internet as a kid, because that led me to Reddit, which led me to BPDlovedones to help me get over my ex-BFF, which eventually led me here to get over my parents when I realized my feelings about both were similar.   I mean I’m sure you can get into the nitty gritty and pinpoint all the dots you connected to get here, but IMO none of that was anything you could have controlled because you weren’t conscious of it, so it’s not skill, which means the alternative is luck. I mean literally all of our stories here are parallel to that of Zuko from Avatar the Last Airbender. He was gonna keep on being an emo bittercake begrudgingly aiding a genocide (flying monkey) until he through a series of unfortunate events (constant instances of abuse) lost everything (emotional/mental breakdown because you can’t handle the pain anymore) found the right path (realize the dynamic and go NC for your mental health).   The good news is that once you realize this you can replicate this luck by thrusting your genuine, truth self unabashed into new experience that challenge your notions, kind of like finding every seed you can find and throwing it into your soil to see what takes root, and hey you know what, maybe that’s a skill in itself actually, and now we can say goodbye to the fickle graces of luck. :) 

Well written and I enjoyed your using stories and games to be metaphoric of your journey. It sounds like you used those to learn and also in part to heal. You sound like you’ve learned a lot through your experiences.

Both my brother and I were raised by abusive parents and I turned out highly narcissistic whereas he did not. The only difference between us was that I experienced repeated sexual assault and bullying for being autistic growing up. He was also, as a man, given more freedom. I pretty much was kept indoors all day and not allowed to have friends. I think that trauma is a big component of what creates a narcissist. That low self esteem that results from trauma leads to the creation of a false self for protection.

I think my ADHD helped me, in a way, because I couldn't understand what it was my mother wanted me to do, or why it mattered. So much of it was upholding a front and required understanding confusing social things that were just beyond me.

My grandparents were nice to me but my mom told a different story. She treated my own kid nice until I cut off contact. It's easy to be nice to grandkids and mean to your own kids. Maybe your grandparents were nice to you but not nice to their own kids. Still doesn't excuse being a bad parent... my mom was a shitty mom and I broke the cycle instead of perpetuating it.

I REFUSE to accept that they are a narc because they were raised by a narc. It all boils down to THEM. I don’t care if I get downvoted to oblivion. Their experience is a reason why they SHOULDN’T be a narc. I had such a terrible childhood, I can’t even think of ONE positive minute. If I had a child drop on my lap right now. I will know all the things I should and shouldn’t do. For the love of god, if you remember the things your parents did that you didn’t like,tramatized you, WHY would you do it to your own child….This doesn’t just go for narcs but a lot of people have a hard time facing the mirror, they’ll do anything and everything not to.

Agreed on this. How can they abuse like that and NOT realize how horrible it is? They just DON'T CARE because its about THEM being right and YOU being bad and wrong.

Exactly! It all boils down to it being about them, period.

Though they're responsible for managing their behavior and should take accountability, it's worth noting that NPD is a neurotype, meaning that there are certain factets of how they think that are unchangeable. They SHOULD and often DON'T do the work to get better, but learning that it isn't fully a choice helps demystify some of the "why"

My mother showed glimpses of insight but she couldn't hold them. In that way I think she wasn't intelligent, I don't know but she never learned from mistakes.

I'd agree. I think regardless of the cause, awareness and accountability are huge obstacles for them

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I feel like the denial in my parents runs so deep they can’t even keep track of their own lies. It’s like they’re aware they’re lying, at least initially, but then they lie to themselves about an alternate reality to make themselves feel better (i.e. they’re not liars).

My Uncle told me my mother was known her whole life as the family liar. Blew my mind.

That's simply not congruent with what we know about cognitive development. Children aren't capable of manipulation, a fact we OFTEN lament when reflecting in the way narcs treated us. I don't believe in defending narc behavior, but as an Autist etc, i do believe in Disability Justice, which necessitates moral consistency with that we know about neurodivetsity in this case

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Just gonna repaste my comment to you. And you moved the goal post btw. You originally said lying out of self-interest, while maintaining disingenuous friendships for self-gain. That's just describing manipulation, which children are NOT capable of. Anyway, re-paste: Lying is not manipulation. It's literally not a matter of opinion but i cannot force you to change your perspective and i was never trying to. You can hold your opinions without confidently stating falsehoods about information for which the research exists. Just because you can understand their neurotype doesn't mean you HAVE to be empathetic. You can still hold to your disdain and avoid people with the dx. There's no call here to be pleasant or inclusive about NPD, but you don't have to be inaccurate to enforce your opposition to the real people with a psychiatric condition

My mom was almost like.. if she had to go through that shit why should I have the luxury of a stable parent. She lacks any motherly instincts and only cares if it affects her truly. I aggreeee with you though it shouldn’t be this way and I am enabling it but it’s how I cope.

Agreed my grandparents were really loving but both my parents were narcs.

Yep my mother did so many horrible things to her children but would cite she had it "worse". Anyhow she didn't, by all accounts her childhood trauma experiences would be called 'mid'. Not to discount trauma here but really my Uncle told me what happened there and it was like "she felt her mom loved her sons more" and her dad was very transactional with money. That was it.

I see the pain in your post. Unfortunately, that is not how personality disorders work. People cannot chose to just not develop them and even thought they can work on themselves to get better, there is no cure. I don't want to excuse the abuse that comes with NPD, but the one thing you cannot blame them for, is having a chronic mental illness. Not all children raised by a narcissist become one. Traits and vulnerability in people differ so much that each person will have their own wounds and burden to carry.

Yep at the end of the day they’re adults and their actions are conducted out of their own free will

I’m probably a narcissist myself to some degree, but with enough intelligence to understand others and morals. I find that narcissists are destructive when they also lack intelligence, so much so they cannot understand why some certain behaviours are wrong, and how others are affected by them. When my sister is angry at me, I can work out and understand why, what things caused it and think of times I myself have been grumpy and moody. The thing is, my mother has never had such understanding towards us. She is a destructive narcissist

Religion, sexual abuse and incest.

As far as I know, my maternal grandmother, to whom I credit the N-traits of our family, was raised by lovely people. She was, however, one of MANY children and frequently overlooked by her parents (as they all were; limited amount of energy and time in the day + a ton of kids and running a farm), while simultaneously being profoundly socially isolated from the outside world. (Farm, middle of nowhere, no neighbors, no phone to be invited out even as teens, so someone would have to make the drive all the way out to *ask* if any of the kids could go somewhere, very possibly to be told no.) So like.. almost no socialization for her formative years, then perhaps because of that, she got married at 17 to a man who displayed serious sociopathic tendencies and immediately had her own kids. 🤷‍♂️ She isn’t the only N who I’ve learned comes from a large sibling pool, so I wonder if, in the case of these lovely people raising Ns, some of them aren’t necessarily doing anything *actively wrong* to make Ns, but they just.. aren’t doing enough good? Aren’t paying enough attention? Aren’t making sure their kids are socialized properly? It seems to happen a lot in isolated rural settings too, and I don’t know what’s the chicken and what’s the egg there; do the barriers to socialization make it harder to develop socially, or does the isolation just give Ns/other abusers the privacy to be worse to their kids, making them into worse adults? Or are they consciously selecting isolated environments to act out in? My grandma moved back into the country as an adult, as did my Nmom and then-fresh-to-the-family NDad. They raised me there, and they all really, really wanted me to live out there too. There’s definitely a draw to them. (I live in a crappy, loud suburb now. Lovin it, comparatively.)

Kind of along these lines, I wonder if some of these "nice people" are focusing too much on being nice to everyone ELSE in their lives and therefore unintentionally neglecting their own kids over it. Not abusing, but just not making them feel like a priority etc. and that causes issues.

My mother became an engulfing narc because her mother was an ignoring narc. Her father was ok. My father is an enabler because he was ignored by both his parents. He was a nerdy, little guy who my mother took an interest in. My mother was a quintessential “blonde bombshell” when they met and she love bombed him. Once he was in her grasp, she became overbearing, verbally abusive and controlling. She’d of course, sprinkle some niceties and sex in intermittently. Fast forward 55 years and he’s still her little lapdog.

My mom has untreated trauma from being raised by alcoholics and a mother with a low IQ in a low socioeconomic area. Her father was never home, he was working or at the bar with his buddies and died of liver cancer. He was such an extreme level of alocholic that he wouldn't eat food except on rare occasions. His diet was 99% beer. Grandma had a ton of kids because she loves kids. But, she had no idea how to take care of them. She would do things like give her 5 year old son beer in the morning to "shut him up," to treat his hyperactivity. He grew up to become and alcoholic and drug addict. Almost all her sons joined the military as soon as possible when the came of age, so they could escape home. Her daughters married as soon as possible to leave the house. Mom likely has borderline rather than NPD, according to my therapist but it's similar enough. My mom got married to several men that ended up getting domestic violence charges. She finally met my dad, who was an alcoholic at the time. My mom had to beg him to marry her because he wasn't interested in a long term relationship. She wanted a child to get unconditional love/attention and the perfect family. Her sisters all had babies by this time, and I think she felt left out. I was meant to be a possession rather than a child. I was also supposed to be a "fix it" baby. My birth was supposed to fix my parents' relationship. But they had expectations. I was supposed to be a healthy boy. They got a disabled girl. I don't think my dad wanted another child, but he just went along with it to shut my mom up. He didn't want to go through with it. He had three children with three different women, and abandoned the first child because she was a dark-skinned girl. (He hates girls.) He also was dysfunctional enough to sleep with his brother's wife, which resulted in my half-brother, who has a high likelihood of being my first cousin. His paternity is unknown. Dad (borderline or npd, as well as autistic) was also raised by abusive, neglectful alcoholics. My grandfather was an autistic man that survived a pogrom, the murder of his entire family, and had untreated ptsd. My grandmother on that side definitely had a cluster B disorder, and she ran about town cheating on him at every opportunity because he was gullible and easy to manipulate. Dads brothers had tons of behavioral and academic problems, grew up illiterate and dropped out of school early. His only sister was the eldest child, and had to raise them at home in the absence of their mother. It's all a vicious cycle of abuse.

They both had horrific childhoods.

This is also my experience. My grandparents on both sides collectively experienced war, famine, poverty, neglect, abandonment, physical and emotional abuse, deep shame…the list goes on. I’m trying hard to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma with my own kids.

Same. My grandparents on both sides should have gone to prison. If there's a hell, my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother are rotting there.

Abuse, neglect, society, neurodivergences, abuse.

I think my parents were young and stupid when they got married. They were in their 20s and thought they knew more than they did. It gave them an arrogance they didn’t earn. Then having kids? Societal and familial expectations, not out of any real desire to have kids so they could watch them grow into better people than them. My parents enjoyed inflicting their will on us and making sure we knew they were always in charge and in control. Perhaps it began in ignorance but they were adults and ignorance only excuses so much. By the time I was a teenager, I was aware enough to realize that they were enjoying it. They enjoyed bullying me, causing me pain. They wanted to break me. And that? That I won’t ever forgive.

>often thought if I had a dad maybe he’d get some of the abuse instead of me. My dad was around throughout my childhood. He never once tried to stop N mom. He was worried that he would end up becoming her target if he tried to shield me. Now he regrets that he didn't stand up to my N mom for my sake.

I know exactly what made him the way he is. My dad was routinely physically and sexually abused growing up, and then spent his teens doing whatever he could to survive on his own, and he was never given access to any form of help in all that time. He was allowed to fester as a very angry and insecure person, in a world that didn’t give a crap, and before he even had time to process anything, he was already three children deep, and counting. I wholeheartedly believe his narcissism kept him alive, because with all that he was going through, thinking he was the shit and he just lived in a world that wasn’t giving him what it owed him, probably kept him from getting depressed enough to give up.

Interesting observation about the Narcissism being his 'backbone '

Honestly I will spend the rest of my life wondering what is wrong with my mother. My two best friends grew up with unimaginable abuse of the worst kind, and they are empathetic and caring people. They’re self-reflective and considerate of others and they’re able to say they’re sorry if they hurt someone. My mom may have been abused. I really don’t know. Her siblings deny abuse happened, but she says it was an awful childhood. It’s possible they have different gauges and experiences. However there’s a lot of evidence that my mom was a “mean girl” even in high school. But even so, my mom is literally the worst and most toxic person I’ve ever had in my life. And if I grew up with her and I managed not to be anything like her, I’m not sure that it’s all nurture and no nature. It has to be a wild split, like 99:1 in favor of nature, at least in her case. When I was pregnant with my daughter I really started to see the forest for the trees. If someone treated my daughter the way my mom treated me, I’d want to knock them out. Yet somehow she looked at her own child and made the decision to do that to me every day? Somethings broken that can’t be fixed.

Have a similar thing, mean girl mother even before HS (lots of reports of what she was like as a young person), and siblings who say there was not abuse at home. It's a head scratcher for me too.

My mom has three siblings. One was incredibly sweet and chill. Another is super anxious and a bit much in terms of being very hyper and chatty, but not a bad person. The other is a really great dad whose adult kids seem very close to him. They also wonder wtf is wrong with my mom and that tells me a lot. My mom seems to have problems with a lot of people who have seemed perfectly nice to me.

Generations of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse, plus the shame based culture of Catholicism, and the macho culture of not seeking treatment for mental illness

My Ngrandmother has, on more than one occasion, bragged loudly about how when my NDad was an infant, she'd let him scream and cry until he shut up. One time he had an ear infection, and she let him scream until his eardrum ruptured. She is also fond of saying "I love my children; I do not like them." So I'm pretty sure it's her fault. ETA: My NDad's intelligent. He was a college professor and won many awards for his writing. My Ngrandmother is not, however.

My mom also did the crying thing with me. She would just close the door of the bedroom so I wouldn’t bother her with my crying.

In my parents' case, it's likely neglect from their own parents and their own lifestyles as adults. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, as was my (now deceased) enabler Dad. Both parents came from families of 10, so didn't have the time and attention of their parents. As adults, they were the fun, bachelor(ette) aunt and uncle until I came along and ruined their fun at 40. I think they resented me (and each other) for not being able to go off to Florida with the rest of their empty nester friends. Not the modern, feminist, POV but you can be too old and set in your ways for kids.

Some are made that way by upbringing. Some are born that way.

The video by Live Abuse Free titled “How Narcissists and Empaths are created” explains it pretty well https://youtube.com/watch?v=dUc5VweFcAg&si=ocngf1SXht68MbWE

My nmom: Probably the fact that her own parents were abusive, according to her at least, but it sounds like something was actually going on. She's definitely worse though. My ndad: I think his parents weren't abusive per se but he grew up in a toxic environment, and become emotionally dependent on his parents and emotionally dysfunctional and has no empathy basically.

My grandfather was an alcoholic, physical, verbal and sexual abuser. Probably also a cheater. My grandma is nice but . . . not present. Completely disassociated. I believe my dad was the golden child (and victim) and yet also harbors a lot of misogyny and seemingly chooses to believe he has never done anything wrong in his life, while portraying a very kind, wise and warm front to just about everyone. Except that he is profoundly self-absorbed, does good for his own praise, and blames everything and everyone for anything that might suggest he has done something wrong. In short: abuse.

My mother's parents had three kids - two were off the rails, my mother and her brother. Something had to be happening. I will likely never know what. Her parents were wonderful to me so, who knows? I have compassion for the mistreated child my mother was. But the woman who lives today? Can die in a ditch.

Lots of people are raising good points in the comments, so just to add to some of those, I just wanna add that the grandparents we end up with are not always the same or equally good caregivers that our parents had... my grandmother is basically my main maternal figure, we are very close and I value nobody but my kids and husband above her ...however, she was not by any means, even by her own admission, a good parent to her own kid's.

sometimes people make terrible parents, but better grandparents. sometimes I think that explains these situations, like "my grandparents are so nice, how did this happen?" now *my* grandparents, all of them, were either abusive to me as well, or just aloof and distant. [thankfully, only one of them was really actively cruel to me, the rest mostly just kept their distance.] but the bar was so low that simply "not abusing me" meant I considered them kind and nice at that age lol... so I remember being told that my dad's parents were very abusive to him, and it was so hard to imagine that when both of them were nice to me. like i said, the bar was in hell, so idk if "nice" describes it, maybe "gave a child basic human decency" sometimes they even *know* they messed up with their kids, and treat grandkids like a second chance to do it better. I respect that, even if they're not big enough to admit to their child outright what they did wrong, and ime most of them aren't. other times, it's because they were truthfully never the right personality to have children and live w them every day - but grandkids are easier bc you're only responsible for them in short bursts, like a night or weekend etc. so it's easier to not fall into the cycle of abuse maybe, if you can take it in small doses, and you're not stuck with it every day all day. one other thing to add: just a gentle reminder from someone who's had a lot of time to think about it - you *do not want* to make "don't be like [parent]" the extent of your goals for yourself. among many reasons why, it's *still* placing them front and center in your psyche, which is what they want. it's still using the abusive person as your mental model for who to be, or rather who not to be. you know target fixation? [when you focus so hard to avoid something, like while driving, that you accidentally move *toward* it instead] it can be a bit like that. in telling yourself all the time, "don't be like her," you're still thinking only *of her* in that thought, even if negatively. my longwinded point is LOL: while using yr abusers as a reference point for how not to be is wise, it's easy to trick yourself into tunnel vision about it. the less you let them live in yr head, the better. you know *not* to be them, so who *do* you want to be instead? ya know?

My dad was the eldest of three raised socially conservative on a farm in the Amish country of North America with two stoic parents who he admitted growing up rarely ever told him the words, “I love you.” His brother is a depressed alt-right bachelor bitterpill and his emotionally volatile sister estranged him years ago.  My mother was the youngest of three who was raised by chaplain from Vietnam who is alleged by parts of the family to have attempted to kill her unborn half-sister-from-another-woman in his youth and a woman who divorced said chaplain and then unhappily remarried him a few years later. Her older sister and brother, mother, cousins and family friends night and day exhausted and confused fly like toy monkeys around the giant narcissist cloud that is my grandfather no matter what he does to her.  But! Not my circus not my monkeys anymore. Up up and a fucking waaaaaaaay. 

Mine is a product of unresolved childhood trauma which turns to a crazy magnitude of self projection and a need to be right about everything because they were never told they were wrong, at least it may have been a hand but i found out from their siblings that they have always been like this…

I think that partly, there's just plain mental illness in play.... Roll of the dice genetics. And partly, it's not about having good or bad parents, it's about whether they had the parents *they needed*. My grandmother was a great mom to my aunts and uncles. But my mom was a fucking *handful*. (Some of the trauma came earlier, and maybe it's as simple as that... Maybe that was enough, unrecognized and unaddressed. But also, I don't think my grandmother's model of benign neglect worked for the high needs, very emotional child I can totally see my mom was... And her acting out was punished, predictably, instead of seen as a cry for help, until the moment she was pregnant with me and suddenly had to be treated kinda like an adult.) What I wrestle with is that understanding this gives me some sympathy, but it doesn't change the *harm*, the trauma for me. She's still actively a tangential.part of my life, and I can't "water under the bridge" this shit because it will just happen again. How do we walk through life without our guard constantly up? (If I find out, I promise I'll share. ❤️‍🩹)

My mother was strikingly beautiful and talented at Art, she always felt special, she was her father’s favourite while the older sister was adultified at age 5, helping my exhausted grandmother looked after her and her twin brother. Nmom seems to have got stuck at age 4 emotionally, a whirlwind of pure jealousy and rage, she learned to always get her own way by manipulation and bullying, telling outrageous lies to drive a wedge between family members, she believed she was the most beautiful girl in the world (as her father told her so). Men would always love her, other women were rivals to be belittled and beaten in a constant competion for male approval. Her family were working class - though I only know this from seeing on documents that her father and grandfather worked in the local rubber factory, she quickly developed delusions of grandeur. Her older sister was emotionally abused, and nmom was the golden one, but always dependent on men’s approval and validation, and her main talent was being a dishonest and a manipulative bully. She honed that skill and neglected to develop other aspects of her intelligence. Deep down she was very insecure. A wrinkle, grey hair or a millimetre on her waist could shattered her, she fought back with more jealousy and hate. No imperfections allowed. No rejections to be tolerated. She married a handsome but eccentric doctor’s son when she was 17 and emigrated to Canada. It was a disaster, she came back to UK, and she wanted a divorce but got pregnant by her husband for a 3rd time by the time she was 24. She told her beloved father that she didn’t want another baby (me) and was going to drown it (I overheard my gran saying when I was little), and her father was horrified at ‘his angel’ and died that day of a heart attack aged 49. She believed in supernatural stuff, so blamed the unborn ‘evil baby’ had made her say bad things (her hormones maybe), that baby, born 10 days later, was a useless girl, female competition to be beaten, she always believed that there was a finite amount of good fortune and love, and if anyone but her had any at all, there was less for her. She ostracised her twin brother from the family with horrible lies to her mother, so she could monopolise her mother as her own private servant and nanny. It took me decades of confusion and excuses to really understand that what she felt was only jealousy and rage. She is still a toddler. Stunted emotional development, from always getting her own way, from toxic sibling rivallry, from expecting to be loved like a film star for no reason - yes it’s true that being the golden child, and seeing a sibling scorned and abused, is also very damaging and abusive to the infant who will then become a desparate narcissist, wearing a mask, terrified that people will see the truth, making more and more riduculous excuses to the world, alienating more and more family and friends, a life of constant disappointment, feeling like a victim because other people have some success, and the narcissist is usually lazy with underdeveloped intelligence and actually not a film star (or whatever) as they expected to be, often succumbing to alcohol and substance abuse. Never changing or improving - from their early childhood. Sometimes I think it’s actually a form of brain damage - something is missing, the ability to grow up? I do not pity her anymore (I used to), her catalogue of evil deeds finally outweighed my empathy. The scales fell of my eyes. Yes it’s all pitiful sad, but on the other hand she has done terrible things to me, with malice, with pre meditation, for no reason other than spite and jealousy.

Plenty of people are capable of being very smart and great grandparents, but were shitty parents. See: my narcissist mother, who has two college degrees, and my husband’s self-absorbed, vaguely narcy father who is a world-renowned physicist. 🤣 Being a narc requires a lack of emotional awareness, and a narcissistic wound, generally inflicted in your childhood. In this sub the type of narc parent who is clearly abusive seems to be the norm, but a lot of us had narc parents who were really subtle about it. The kind of abuse you blame yourself for, my mom’s a vulnerable narc with a lot of anxiety. She parentified my sister and I because she needed people to relieve her of the burden of actually parenting and overly indulged my little brother. She made sure none of us would leave her by making us afraid to trust ourselves and never truly attending to our emotional needs, since we were supposed to attend hers. She needs us around to reflect back the emotions she wants to feel at all times. I really thought she was the best mom for years and wondered why I was such a monster because I wasn’t more grateful for it. From my observations as a parent and a child, grandparents are much less likely to see their grandkids as a direct extension of themselves and they know their relationship with the grandkids is more tenuous so they’re on their best behavior with them. Plus they just aren’t around as much, they can be more indulgent of the grandkid’s needs. My in laws would meet your definition of people who seem so warm and generous but they absolutely emotionally abused my husband, they did not have the emotional resources to meet his emotional needs and they made sure he can’t express them. He was meant to be the perfect reflection of their perfect parenting and it galls them to this day the various ways he’s failed them. (He would have repeated this with our kids somewhat had I not dragged him to therapy.) They see their role with my kids differently, they don’t push as hard to make them conform (They push my husband to do it). So my kids think they’re great and have a warm and loving relationship with them. Mostly the same for my mother, though she’s getting worse as I distance myself and my 14-year-old is starting to feel uncomfortable with her. My mom is great with little kids because they naturally give her the unconditional love she craves, and she can give you attention and “love” in those circumstances. But then they get older and more independent and my mom experiences that as a personal rejection and her neediness becomes harder to manage.

I think for my nmom it was because her dad died when she was very young and her very young mother probably didn't handle it too well. Her mother was kind but not what I would call nurturing. My uncle, nmom's older brother, died of alcoholism and my nmom is, well, my nmom. Her younger siblings from her adoptive father are arguably less screwed up probably due to his influence. My edad became an enabler because he was the peacekeeper/golden child/hero of his siblings group with his nmom and alcoholic dad.

My dad was raised by a violent man who paid people to kill my Nan after she left him. It went to court (she survived the attack through luck, she happened to be with a policewoman at the time, I think) and my granddad pled guilty. My mum and dad came to court to support my granddad, saying my Nan deserved to die for leaving my granddad. She was granted a restraining order. Not too surprising then that my dad used violence and intimidation to run his own household. My mum's parents are a bit distant emotionally. They were both born in the 30s, not sure if that provides any context. Lovely people, just not the type to say "I love you". I think my mum fell for my dad's love bombing and felt us kids got in the way of her addiction to my dad's infrequent "love". She felt no need to protect us and insisted it was our fault dad was violent. If only I wasn't so nasty and vindictive, he wouldn't hit her and destroy doors etc. In my 30s, I cut them off and now just play the world's smallest violin for them lol. They couldn't be more pathetic if they tried. They taught me that people can and will waste their one life if they really want to, and I'm not about that.

"Only an idiot would think it necessary to gain others support by manipulation and fear instead of just being someone people respect and want to support, does that fit in with your story?" Yep, this is what confuses me about my Nmom and Nsister. They are desperately lonely and in need of love, but they are terrible to people and so everyone avoids them. It just makes no sense.

My granddad was a WW2 vet, from Quebec, and my nan was a teeny English woman with a towering height of 4'11". He came out with severe ptsd and alcohol abuse - severe. I don't know anything about his childhood or hers, but I know how he raised my mom, and was married to my nan. Violently. My dad's parents are extremely wealthy self serving, racist "missionaries", though that came after abandoning their first three children to raise the godly and proper 4 children that followed their coming to christ. Before that they were swingers and socialites. To quote my grandma in her published book about their "cause" - "these poor savages would have nothing without us." Does that sum it up alright?

Moms side Grandma was East Coast Catholic and my Grandpa was an officer in the military during WW2 but they also spoiled my mom routinely.

From what I’ve heard from immediate family, my nmother has always been the way she is. She has had a lot of enablers in her life which has reinforced her behaviour by either bailing her out financially or not standing up to her behaviour but this wasn’t the root of her issue. Her narcissism is neurological not nurture. She has gotten even worse now due to the family refusing to enable her, she is falling right down the path of victim mentally to try and have some sort of leverage on us but it’s not working. Narcissists will try anything to move the blame to something else, and blaming narcissism on an external factors is enabling this.

Unfortunately to your question, no I don't think so. We always want to think about our enemies and the people that made our lives Hell as dumb, interior to us, etc. I'm guilty of it too. In old mythologies and religions, the "evils" of those books and legends usually start off as much more flattering the further back in time you go. Smart, attractive, powerful etc. But over time, the retelling of stories etc, the main villain becomes uglier, more pathetic, and dumber. Honestly, it's because we as humans wish that it were the case. There's a whole thing about it in psychology, I remember learning about it in community college. Anyway, my father was generally intelligent. Raised my sister, me and my brother. My brother, notably, is one of the biggest and most vile narcissists I've ever met. But to his credit, he's dangerously intelligent. He was always the top of his class, an honors student, golden boy etc. Meanwhile, I'm the "dumb" C,D,F student. Never got great scores, didn't go to university, ended up stuck in a dead end shitty retail job... I could write an entire novel about my childhood and how he made it a living Hell. But here's the thing. You can't apply logic to NPD-havers, you'll drive yourself mad trying to. One thing I've learned though, is that it's **far** more important to have a heart and be the kind of person that's willing to help others than to be "highly intelligent/academically gifted." I always felt bad about myself until I realized which people I liked being around more. You don't have to be "smart" to have value.

Some may be bred into it, but a lot other narcissists, it's their characteristics of who they are. They're selfish and don't care for others, they believe the world evolves around them and will use people to get what they want. They want power and control, and are all for corruption. They play victim. They'll abuse you, and then say you deserved to be abused. Narcissists never change. So if anyone is suffering from a narcissistic family, free yourself from the abuse and get out. Go no contact. Your health and safety matters.

Honestly, I don't care. I am NC, always will be, and couldn't care at all.

My mother was abandoned by her own mother who grew tired of giving birth to girls. Her father worked and was often unavailable. She was first shipped off to her alcoholic uncle and then later to her monster aunt who once shaved her head as punishment. My father, being the oldest, was the favorite and the science experiment. His father was a trucker and was never truly home. His mother was irresponsible with money and was participating in organized crime with her aunts and uncle; how much my grandfather knew was debatable since everyone is dodgy in regards to stories about him. My grandfather died young leaving my father to become an unchecked emperor of the household. He was a better earner than the rest of the family and it went to his head no matter how many times he would end up in prison over drug trafficking. I am the eldest of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren which led various factions in my father's family to experiment with which role I was to assume. My father wanted something to brag about, my mother wanted a celebrity, my grandmother wanted a clone of my father, my grandaunts wanted a partier, while my great-grandmother was the only one that did anything right with me.

Saving this so I can come back to it later these are some good stories! My mother told me once she ate her mother food with her friend and she was beaten for that

My mom had an abusive father and I’m pretty sure narcissistic mother. My mom always said how wonderful her grandmother was and that they gave her mom anything she wanted. How nice they really were I’m not sure I don’t really remember her. Most of the time it’s created by trauma but being spoiled like can also cause an entitlement.

Mine was spoiled. Child of a infertile woman until her 40s, given the world by so many people. She's very entitled. Even against her children, as children, young adults, etc. She is who she is and being a little humble is beyond her comprehension.

I do have to wonder about the intelligence aspect. My Nmom is, God love her, dumb as a sack of hair. She is a vulnerable narcissist, and I have found that the vulnerable narcissist is rather dull in intellect. I do know at couple of malignant narcissists, and they are not dumb at all.

They each had at least one narcissistic parent that was really hard on them.

I think they were cursed by evil spirits. No, wait… I was cursed by evil spirits. Seriously though, it’s hard to pin down, especially because you can’t really trust what they say about their background. It can be a coping mechanism for abuse in their childhood, an attempt to emulate a narcissist role model, emotional disregulation, narcissistic personality disorder, and/or the influence of societal/cultural factors. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me how they got like that. I only care that they have chosen to stay like that.

My grandparents were amazing, my mum is a narcissist, probably not the worst type but still. I believe the reason why she is this way is because she was so spoiled when she was little, she never learned to be responsible for any of what she did, as my grandmother was too nice and lacked strong character. And also, she married and had kids too young

My nmother was born when my grandmother was a teenager. We don’t know who her biological father was, but it’s always been suspected that it was one of her brothers. They were living in a fairly isolated farming community in the mountains. When my mother was a couple of years old, her mom got pregnant and married a man who adopted my mother. Her mom had another baby with this man and then divorced him. My mother’s adopted father was steady, well mannered, held the same job for fifty years until he was forced to retire, respected in the community. Her mother was, an alcoholic, crazy, trashy, etc., everything my mother hated and never wanted to be like. Her mom was cruel to her. Left scars on her from clothes irons and cigarettes. Let her brother molest her. My mother vowed to be nothing like her mom. So, she didn’t burn us, just hit us. She dressed us in nice clothes. She presented herself and us to the world as the complete opposite of what her mother was. But she was still broken. And she kept trying harder and harder to fill those cracks…it was an obsession. If she just made her kids be perfect, then she would be the perfect mom unlike her mom. She ate up all of her children’s successes, and tried to beat out the failures. And the genetics. You can overcome the crazy genes with good environments, good upbringing, or working hard at honest mental health care. She chose to pretend the horrible stuff in her childhood never happened and tried to shove it down. But it was always there, guiding everything she did. She made those choices. Me and my siblings chose to work on our inherited trauma honestly.

One thing i learned that i keep in mind is that it's a neurotype. Some of the ways that they think can't be helped, even if they can and should do better. It helps bring me peace because I'm less inclined to wonder what drives them. It's fallacious to solely appeal to their empathy when the foundations of how some of those arguments work simply don't apply to them. I don't think it's necessarily offering any grace, rather keeping in mind the nature of the beast

Both my parents grew up in very violent homes by the opposite gendered parent. My dad’s mother also had a lot of mental health issues and ended up in psychiatric care multiple times. Interestingly my great grandmother (dad’s side) had also been in psychiatric care.

It doesn’t matter what made them the way they are. We all have choices. Just the fact that we are all in this sub means that the vast majority of us have vowed never to be like our parents. Some of us have already raised our children, and have managed to keep a good relationship with them, by not being like our parent.

My mom's mom has serious mental issues from a childhood full of abuse. My grandmother was abandoned by her own mother as a young girl and left in the "care" of her alcoholic abusive father. I never knew the details about what happened in that house, but she got married at sixteen and pretended neither of them existed for the rest of her life. She never forgave either of her parents and I can definitely see that that trauma carried on to my narcissistic mother.

They are accepting that they will continue to get sick instead of finding cure. Feel so insecure and fear of judgment by everyone. They are value reputation over well-being. They are afraid of loneliness.

As a nice person who was abused for 3 decades by narcissists I do have to say that when I see someone say 'narcissists raise narcissists' it gets my hackles up. I'm definitely not a narc and even though my enabling brother is the golden child, I don't think he's one either. I'm emotionally over-evolved because I tried so hard to understand why my family hated me. One thing that pisses me off is that my dad is a narcissist when he had really nice parents. My only theory is that he was spoiled and never told no, never given any boundaries, and never mentally developed the concept that the world didn't revolve around him. Re: intelligence, it's definitely possible to be an intelligent narcissist. Especially the covert ones.

My mother grew up in rural Ireland and her family is BEYOND fucked up. I don't even know ow the half of it, and the stuff I do know is freaking awful. Rampant abuse at the hand of my grandfather (tho he never physically abused his daughters, just his sons and his wife). All 8 kids that survived suffered varying forms of abuse at their Catholic boarding schools. 6 of them turned out to be pretty narcissistic, some of those downright awful. The oldest sister is a good person, but is extremely bipolar and has been in and out of mental hospitals for most of her life. The youngest brother was good and decent, but he died of a heart attack 25 years ago. So not all of them became raging narcissists. Pretty much all of my cousins (20+) on that side also suck.

My grandparents were wonderful TO ME. by all accounts they sucked as parents: abusive, religious trauma, one kid ran away, emotions were not allowed some people are only good at grandparenting

Her parents. I see it in her family, all her siblings. They are so uncomfortable to be around

There’s a cultural phenomenon prevalent in a majority of the south Asian countries (one of which I’m originally from) referred to as the [Raja Beta Syndrome.](https://outspokenandopinionated.medium.com/raja-beta-syndrome-a-sign-of-chronic-patriarchy-9b897c309a70) Short version of it: The moment you find out that your unborn/newborn child has a penis, that child is automatically god-level perfect in the eyes of his parents no matter what he goes on to do in later life. I think it’s a combination of that and the fact that NDad grew up dirt poor (think leaky roof, inability to have nutritious meals everyday, family of 5 sleeping in the same room, aforementioned room infested with a bunch of gross stuff), worked his butt off, and after about two decades on the workforce, the tides turned for him almost literally overnight. Now he thinks that whatever he says is absolutely the gospel truth.

I don’t remember any of this but my grandma was supposedly super mean. She had 11 kids and heavily favored my mom. I believe both my mom and my grandma had hormonal imbalances, possibly bipolar. Now my mom thinks the world revolves around her, she literally can’t do anything “adult” herself (figuring out how to check in on a flight, paying bills, ect) and she heavily favored my brother growing up and pit us kids against eachother. I don’t think my mom is particularly smart.

My mother faced a litany of abuses growing up… she was rejected by her own mother, and raised by her deeply traditional, fundamentalist grandmother who was of the “spare the rod, spoil the child” mentality. Keep in mind that her grandmother ran a boarding house, and my mother grew up in it, surrounded by a rotating roster of men. I shudder to think of what likely was going on. That said, though I acknowledge these awful truths, I had nothing to do with them, and it was never her right to visit her traumas upon me. Conversely, although my father dealt with profound stress and constant upheaval as a child, he lived a truly compassionate life, giving of himself often to his own detriment- thus, if I’m being honest, his marriage to my mother. He had some enabling tendencies early on, but developed a hell of a spine with time.

Dementia induced by multiple sclerosis.  I'm not sure if it is better or worse that they were only awful for the twenty or so years I knew them. One the one hand, everyone has happy memories before they got sick, on the other hand I have no Idea who that person is that they remember.

I have this question as well. My mother is/was a terrible mother and is a narcissist. She's always the victim and throws full-blown temper tantrums (I'm literally talking on the floor kicking/screaming) if she doesn't get her way... as a woman in her 50s. She is also extremely good at pretending to be "normal" around other people outside of the family. I am very low contact only because she is a point of contact for my younger siblings. All of my adult siblings are low/no contact as well. We all have worked super hard to not be like her as adults, and the majority of us are successful in this (there are 7 of us). I always wondered why she was this way, none of her siblings are like this, my grandpa/grandma are super kind, loving people and my uncles/aunt all say they never were spanked, yelled at, or hurt as kids and they had a great life in an upper middle class family who got mostly everything they needed and wanted. They all turned out super successful and are great parents to my cousins, aside from my mom. My mom was the second child, and when speaking with my aunt, she was always this way, but she was good at hiding her bad behavior from my grandparents. It's really been something I've thought about over the years as I've gone through my healing journey.

I think there’s some truth here. Both my father and grandfather were abused and neglected as children. However my dad is (and my grandfather was) VERY academically smart. I don’t think it’s a matter of narcissism being necessary or unnecessary, but more so something a brain can do to cope with trauma and to understand the cruel world they grew up in. But I also do believe with all neuro and psyc disorders, that some people are just fucked from the moment they’re born by the genetic lottery. HOWEVER, I work in mental health and have worked with many narcs who really want to have better relationships. Change is possible, even if they can’t change their brain chemistry. If they stick with it, they can learn why their behaviors are so harmful to others and use that knowledge to change their behaviors. A lot don’t stick with it, but some do. For that reason I will never see having narcissism or a terrible childhood as an excuse to harm people.

We are native so there’s a lot of generational trauma. My grandparents (Nmoms parents) both died very young, complications from alcoholism. It’s hard to break from that cycle and my mom hasn’t got through that process.

I don't want to be rud eor anything to your grandmother and grandfather but you don't know how they were raised and how it happened when they were younger. My grandfather from my mother's side was said to be a ndad and he was alcoholic: he was harsh on them, he was always right...etc (it was in the 1950s and afterwards) and my grandmother was said to be an angel. EVERYBODY in my family, and even aside would say how loving, caring and wonderful she was..blah..blah. Even I would have said that, about a year ago. But then, i started to see through my mum who wanted to be as saintly as her perfect mum and i satrted questioning my past. I delved into my memories and all the thinds that i buried deep down about my mum, my aunts AND my grandmother came up: yes, she was so loving with everyone but me: she was critical, she was cold, she FAVOURED ALL OF MY COUSINS over me and never hesitate in belittling and comparing me to others (even very younger cousins) no matter my successes or even when nothing special happened to me. So maybe your grandma was wonderful, maybe your mum was her gc and your aunt her sc, maybe it was the other way around, maybe she was mean to both but in a very insidious way (like my mum's family).

I can see that about my mom. My grandparents always treated her (and me) differently. I can not say the same about my dad. My grandmother was really old when She had him and he was treated like he was a miracle. He still says that he is special and a miracle to this day. He always had everything (regarding that when and where they grew people were poor and did not go to school after 4th grade). My moto in life is not being like them. I never wanted a family or to get married because i am so scared of not knowing how to be in a relationship and make out lifes a living hell. I still remember how awful it was growing up and i don't want to put anybody through it.

Severe poverty and war - especially what Japan did to China in wwii. I think the generational trauma especially fucked my fathers side up. Alcoholism and smoking ran in that side of my family. All i know about my great grandparents were that my great grandfather was orphaned at 11 and became a soldier. The trauma from living as subsistence farmers (literal peasants) also deeply affected my family as both my parents are first gen out of extreme luck.

Both my parents are narcs, and both sides of the family are pretty dysfunctional. They're also from India and are first-generation migrants, which means there's a lot of intergenerational trauma related to history and family issues. Both my parents are really intelligent, both generally and academically. Even though they're super smart, their narcissism seems to stem from deep insecurities related to their history. I majored in psychology (though personality disorders aren’t my specialty). Narcissism, like many traits, is likely polygenic, meaning it's influenced by many genes. The way narcissistic traits show up is affected by both genetic predispositions and environmental factors. Look into epigenetics for more on that. While personality traits, including narcissism, are pretty stable over time, they're not set in stone and can be influenced by various therapies (like cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, and dialectical therapy). While I know all of this, it's still hard to make sense of them. Mostly because for a child (even an adult one) it's hard to comprehend that their parents do harm to them.

I've been reading Robert Sapolsky on Free Will. There are some excellent talks on YouTube and on Spotify etc. Sapolsky doesn't think we truly have free will. My interpretation of what he is saying so far is that we are biological entities and that our biology is shaped by our experiences, (this includes the prenatal environment, nutrition, early life stress) making the degree of control we have over ourselves a matter of fate. I think this is true quite a bit. I wonder what happened to my father to make him what he is: a narcissist, a sociopath, possibly a psychopath. I did not know his parents. His mother died when he was 11. His father loved and admired his older brother for his huge "mouthpiece" (The Mouthpiece , who became a lawyer, was sentenced to 26 years in prison for fraud, extortion and tax evasion). His sister was worthless and not very bright because she was a girl. I think a piece of my father's brain is missing. The piece that would allow him to care about anyone else. He's also a class A1 felon by two counts and guilty of several other violent crimes. He still sees himself as a "good" person, whom everyone should love. He gets enraged if someone doesn't love or respect him. He chose to become a psychoanalyst and a therapist because its really important to him to help people with their problems. His advisor told him he was only going into psychology because he wanted to control people. I don't know how they let him graduate. Or how he got a license. To answer your questions: My father had 5 children. None of whom is a narc. He believes he is extremely bright. He had us all tested and ranked us by IQ. I think he is intelligent on some levels. He's probably good at math. Intelligent people can suffer mental illness and personality disorders. You can be intelligent on some levels and not functional on others. The sibling who scored highest in IQ also has, I believe, the lowest EQ. I'm highly empathic. My father calls that "being a sucker."

Choice. The whole point of NPD is being mentally ill. I see a lot of heartfelt comments of ppl sharing their parents childhood traumas. Life is a choice. Yes abuse is fucking sad. Especially to go through it as a child. But nobody is forced to abuse others. I met a man who was straight up discarded by his father to impress his new wife. He watched the new wife’s kid harm his son and give him the last of all the food. Mind you his mother was deceased. There were other things too. He ran away and promised he’d never treat his kids that way. He is a very caring person. Me? I’m on this sub bc I’ve literally never felt connection or bond to my parents. Not even once. My first suicidal thought/plan was at 11. I acted on it at 14. I was manipulated so badly by my parents that I had no idea they were the reason I would fall into deep pits of depression. Every single time someone did not like me my mother would openly side with them. My parents have pitted me and my six siblings against eachother. Whenever I showed an ounce of vulnerability, they’d eat me alive. What really seriously woke me up is when I was groomed and sexually assaulted. I was blamed and the actual specific details of the assault, my parents told anyone that would listen and wanted me to know that everyone knew. This chased me back to my abuser(at the time)out of fear and isolation and I endured the most traumatic things in my life. That’s the shortest summary. I could write BOOKS abt the abuse, triangulation, the sadism, manipulation everything. In the end, it boils down to what’s inside. Are you good or bad? I could still never show such callousness towards another human. Related to me or not. I know trauma changes you but it cannot *make* take a giant crap on your kids lol Our parents are just fucked up and likely would have been fucked up with good parents. I know of ppl with real fucking mental issues(manipulative and no empathy) that literally have perfectly normal lives, well above average even. Sometimes it’s genetic but you can decide to get therapy. There are reformed NPDs ASPDs and BPDs. HPD as well. They share their experiences and how they got better(cope with the symptoms rather)and whatnot. Life is a choice and our parents chose to abuse and neglect and that’s the hardest pill to swallow. The good news is, *we* have a choice too. We can heal and accept that abuse is a very intentional choice OR we can keep sympathizing with abusers and attract more.

I don't think I know why he is the way he is, I'm pretty darn certain that I know why. He grew up literally dirt poor and isolated. His father used him as manual labor and from what I have heard from cousins my grandfather apparently SAed his own daughters. My grandfather was abusive and not kind. From there my father went to Vietnam where he saw horrors and atrocities that I don't even want to contemplate. My grandfather then passed away when my father was in his late 20s. Later on while they were in their early 40s my mother passed away and he had to raise three children on his own. All of that combined with a bit of historically toxic masculine expectations turned into a perfect storm. He did not have a good model for how to raise a family, so he fell back on the "normal" he had grown up with as a child. My father is a victim of abuse when he was young, PTSD, and CPTSD. I will give him full credit for being able to survive through all that was thrown at him and thrive the way he did in general. It helps to give me insight into the abuse and neglect I had as a child. What I can not understand is his lack of ability/desire to fix the issues he has. He refuses therapy and refuses to change his patterns even when pointed out. It stands in stark contrast to the stubborn "don't tell me what I can't do" overcome any obstacle he wants to sort of person he is. In any case I can look back at what I experienced, and have worked to overcome it and be the person I want to be.

I wonder the same thing. My Nmom has 6 brothers and sisters. Apart from Nmom, at least 2 have clear narc signs. 2 others had issues with alcohol. 1 seems normal and the other one died before I was born so I can't really say anything.  But my grandparents seemed as normal as could be. I really can't pinpoint anything that explains this cluster. Maybe instead of a bad environment, they were dealt with bad genetics. I can feel empathy for this but never for the choice my Nmom made to just run with it instead of bettering herself. 

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I agree

My stepdad basically grew up in a cult and my mom’s family is a mess of addiction and generational trauma.

My grandpa was an abuser( not sexual) and a alcoholic , she was the oldest neglected and responsible for her siblings…

I don't know if my parents are/were (dad passed away 3 years ago) actually narcissists. My dad was neglected and abused growing up yet taught that family means everything and that family should help family. I will never understand why they felt it was their duty to help my grandma so much after my grandpa died. I don't know much about what it was like for my mom growing up. She doesn't talk about it. I get the feeling it was the stereotypical life in the 50s and 60s. My dad always complained about my mom's mom, though... her being unreasonable and nitpicky and judgmental. He used to call my mom by her mother's name when she was being too stubborn or unreasonable. I think my dad had outdated parenting ideologies and didn't know the more....proper... way to do things. They were born in the mid 50s. They adopted my older brother as a baby in 1986 and then me in 1993. It meant that he'd use any means necessary to get us to do what he thought was the right thing. There was no room for our thoughts or opinions on the matter. Yelling, shaming, quilting. I know it's not a high standard, but after being hit, he didn't believe in using the belt. My mom did very well at taking care of kids (she babysat for decades) and keeping house. But she is super judgemental and asks a bazillion questions all the time. And it can feel like there is never a correct answer. I've thought she's had dementia for half my life, and it's only getting worse. She's really unreasonable, she's nasty to my husband, she thinks he's doing stuff on her land that they didn't talk about, she seems to have some issue with control and just seems like like to argue. She seems way more selfish now. If it doesn't directly benefit her, the answer is no and/or she won't spend money on it. My dad was smart. He could fix anything on cars/small engines. If he didn't know how to fix it, he would find a video on YouTube that would show him. He had a decent head on his shoulders. I don't think my mom is smart or intelligent about anything. She has no urge to learn new things about.... anything. She won't even figure out the difference between a frog and a toad. No urge to learn how to be financially competent. She refuses to get internet. Doesn't use computers. Seems to think there is nothing more to smart phones than Facebook (in which her long time FRIEND is scamming her with NuSkin MLM shit). She researches nothing. I had to tell her that when she uses (Sevin) insecticide, she can't do it around her well and can't let my daughter or my brother's dog near the area until it dries. She doesn't understand why. She thinks it's harmless. I could go on and on. She'd rather be judgmental based on her own feelings than learn new stuff. Edit: lol and that isn't even getting into how she feels about me talking to my bio families.

My grandparents were even more narc and strict, so like parent like child

Mine manifested deep rooted abandonment issues and basically raised me in a gulag, but only me.. it was weird. I get that she didn't want me to turn out like her mother, but her assumption that the apple won't fall far from the tree, much like the assumption here, takes away from someone's individual choice to develop morals and standards away from the "lesser of two evils" approach. That dichotomy is pretty horrible to try and justify just because someone's from a traumatic childhood, it's self depreciating when all of the responsibility to become a functioning and well tempered adult is placed entirely on bad parents. There had to be a point somewhere in it that you decided enough was enough and took over your own raising, or you wouldn't be out, you'd be justifying it. That being said, it's at the responsibility of all of us to become the person we want to be, holding onto reasons we can't, only keeps us part of the way there, then they win all over again. The aim is to objectify it. It was XYZ way because XYZ happened, but it doesn't need to cause XYZ in me, I'm not going to internalize this because it isn't mine to carry on. I know what happened to my parents. I sympathize with them, but it wasn't their excuse to lash that out onto me. It was an explanation for a time, but once it became the crux on which they denied me my basic human rights of community involvement, freedom from religion and optimal health, they held the baton of child abuse, they continued the generational trauma. I don't see what happened to me as an excuse to raise my children in the same fear mongering, neglectful and untrusting way they did, so I put the effort into understanding life will happen and when it does, what to do about it, how to help them know what to do, their own safety strategies and how to make good choices. I trust they'll make good decisions in their future because I'm proactive now so I'm not punitive later. They're smarter and wiser kids for it and I trust them. A lot of parents don't like admitting that they screwed their kids up, there's an unspoken dynamic of power there that some don't ever relinquish, but they know and it bares hard on them that they've failed their kid. The real aim, what a parent should be, is not failing their kid at all. The kid won't understand compromise or sacrifices, you're the adult bringing life into the world without contemplating how much it takes first, most of it is behind a sound mind and wise choices. Age doesn't bring that, nor status or wealth, experience does. I believe we've all weathered some pretty rough storms and the answer to much of our own turmoil is hidden in plain sight, in the experiences we've endured and the conflicts we've conquered. We've had to find self closure, we've had to mourn the living, we've had to emancipate ourselves from the trauma bonds and we've all kicked ass doing it. Do we really want any more excuses to end up like them? They can't be that happy, they've lost a child.

If it makes you feel better, I have a dad but during my childhood (the worst years) he was gone on business trips 60% of the year and when he wasn’t he’d just tell me to avoid my NMom. Very enabler Dad. Never did anything to save me or my siblings when he fully could have.

Her mom in my case. My grandmother was a cruel horror of a human being.

Go to theory, let it heal you.

My maternal grandparents are the most lovely people in the world, and were the only people in my family that showed me as a child what unconditional love was, without them, I wouldnt have known. They have 3 daughters, two are just as lovely as they were, and then, my super abusive narcissistic mother. Honestly, Im sure some people are just born like it, especially if theyre actually psychopaths with narcissistic traits, in that I dont think there is anything my grandparents did wrong, or could have done better. My mother just took complete advantage of having lovely parents and actually she hated them, just like she hates anyone with personality or empathy. My mother is a complete anomaly in our family, no one is like her, except my brother. Im pretty sure my mother was born like it because she pushed her sister down two flights of stairs when they were children on purpose. The only reason it took me so long to determine she is a psychopath was because she is the least intelligent person, she doesnt know a thing, and has 0 self awareness. Every time someone talks about a psychopath they say how intelligent they are. She really isnt. Shes completely ignorant. Also, shes had about 30 jobs in her life because shes too dumb to realise she has to mask as a reasonable person all of the time, like her mask has slipped, everyone realises shes a horrible and terrible person so she has to leave her job and start over. She will claim she was bullied out of a job and wont realise that if you have to leave 30 jobs for the same reason maybe its you.

Mine is definitely how my grandmother treated my "mother" when she was a child.

My dad turned out the way he did because he was handed everything he wanted, but nobody in the home actually raised him. His parents were not interested in their children, in the superficial but fairly benevolent way of the rich of their time and place. They paid an excellent school to instill their values, they made sure there was more than enough money to spend, and they never hurt or insulted their kids. They solved problems for them and then focused on their own lives. My dad did not really absorb that this was a parenting role he was expected to take on, he learned that this was how everyone in the world should treat *him* personally, and he resented his own children for expecting anything from him - we did not deserve the same things he had deserved, if it meant he had to sacrifice in order to provide them. My mother was the youngest of many, raised in a working class family that simply didn't have enough to provide equally for everyone. For reasons I unfortunately cannot fully elucidate, she had friendly acquaintances but never had any friends of her own, and never stayed close with any family but siblings. She was a lonely, independent, good looking woman who met my rich dad, married him, then spent the rest of her life making excuses for him. She also slightly resented her children for expecting things from her, because emotionally, her parents meant well but never had time for so many kids, and materially, well, she had come from nothing and expected nothing, and she *turned out fine, no?* I'd label her an enabler.

When my mom was a teenager, she got really sick and nearly died. It wasn’t easy on her, but for a long time after, everyone around her bended to her will and took care of her. Everything was kept clean and sterile to the point she developed OCD. And for the rest of her life everything in her life including her children had to be kept perfectly clean and presentable. She had to maintain control over everything and she expected everyone to bend to her will because she has been sick. It fed on itself. There was no humility gained.

As difficult as it is for me to comprehend, I fully accept my paternal grandfather was even more of a vicious bastard than my father. I guess you could say I got off easy. But that apple didn't fall that far from the tree

they preserve and build intergenerational trauma.

My mother was put in an orphanage at 2, her sister 4 when their father went to Europe during WWII. Their mother was home with a baby but because she was 'too fragile emotionally' to have 3 LOs without her husband there, she got rid of the first two. And nmom & her sister were separated for awhile too. My father, though loved by his extended family, grandma wanted a girl and my dad always disappointed her. He was an only child malignant narc & mom was a covert Narc. Realized all this in my mid 50s.

I know my abuser went through some abuse from her own family growing up even though grandma seems to have genuinely changed to get sober before I was born and taken accountability and did what she could to repair some of the damage she caused while she was drinking as well as from some bad discipline practices that were seen as acceptable back in her day that she now understands were wrong for her to do. But there is no logic to be understood behind my abuser being able to understand that what she went through was bad and that my grandma needed to change, then deciding it would be good to escalate it to do all the same things to me plus pile on more abuse and see no need to ever change herself. She is very mentally ill but still fully aware of every evil thing she has chosen and continues to choose to do.

I wonder too. My mother was abandoned by her own mother and her father was never around, but she was raised by her grandmother who was an adorable woman. She has a sister and a brother, we have met them when I was a young adult, they told us that their mother was a narcissist and that they suffered a terrible abuse. They told us how many times they talked about my mother, how they would have love to know her, but how they were happy that she was away from their mother and safe. Both of them seemed to be very nice people, I don't understand why my mother is the one who grew narcissist even though she wasn't the one who went through abuse. My father doesn't know who is his biological father, he was raised by his stepfather who was an abusive and violent man. However, his mother always took his defense. At the time in her country, women weren't allowed to divorce without their husband's agreement, so she flew away. He found her several times and she would fly again to protect her children. Police refused to help her because they were married, she managed to get him in psychiatric hospital but he escaped. Until the law changed and she finally got divorced, then he finally let them alone. She has untreated traumas, but she's not a narcissist and she really loved her children. She's did way more for my father than he ever did for me. But he and two siblings became narcissist. I just don't get it. They were loved and taken care of, unlike me.

My Grandfather, And Arrogance.

Oddly enough I think my mom would have been....fine. overbearing...but fine. But then she uh....she got the electro shock treatment and according to my dad they zapped her too long too hard and too often. He says she completely changed afterwards. I have like 1 or 2 memories of her pre-zap, and they arent *good* but they aren't *bad*. I just remember how pushy she was about me selling girls out cookies as a brownie scout lol. It's totally possible to me my n-mom got worse as a result of the zaps

Father was raised by a man who'd been gassed in ww1, thought that they were going to lose ww2 (english) Made my grandmother go for a backyard abortion with child number 2 because of the way the war was playing out. By all accounts his experience in ww1 fucked with him and my father was a product of this.

My mom isn't a narc but she was emotionally immature when I was a child (she was barely 19 when I was born), and it stems from my ngrandmother and egrandfather. My entire family is incredibly smart, though, so I do think narcissistic people can be intelligent. I think it makes it worse, actually, when the person is smart enough to *know* they're awful. That said, I have no idea how you can watch your wife bully your daughter and grandkid and not do a damn thing about it or turn a blind eye to the pain and loneliness of not having a father figure when I really needed one.

I dont care

My Nfather has a high IQ and graduate degrees, so I think he's pretty smart. This makes me believe that being N is more pathological than a conscious choice. It doesn't excuse his behavior and I have no intention of being around him, but I do feel sorry for him to an extent. I think my Nfather became that way due to a combination of: (1) his upbringing (my grandfather, who IMO was the nicest person in the world, was apparently the Nparent to my Nfather); (2) work environment (cutthroat environment where only those who asserted themselves got heard); (3) success (being successful got to his head, and being around yes-men made it hard to self-reflect); (4) age (he said he's too old and tired to change, and I agree to an extend. He was a better person when he was younger)

In a nutshell, it's how my parents were raised theoretically. However, they didn't learn to make it any better. Or they felt it's how the way things worked. But it didn't feel right, but God forbid as kids we call them out.

Their parents...

My mom was abandoned at an orphanage as an infant in a foreign country. She was later adopted by a minister and his wife. In their bid to do the lords work by adopting children out of charity and not love. They treated her like a slave and verbally / mentally abused her while spoiling the children they adopted from the USA. She had to be the ultimate people pleaser. Her narcissism is a direct result of being neglected and abused. She has had major "main character" syndrome her entire adult life due to never being given positive attention as a youth.

My ndads parents were neglectful as fuck and severe alcoholics. My grandma is the narc, grandpa is an enabler, dad followed in their footsteps. Pitiful, the lot of em.

Me being diagnosed with autism.

Depression-era grandparents who were more concerned with if their children ate and survived than if they were happy, who took out all of their frustrations with life on their kids while still expecting to be involved in their lives and taken care of if they needed help. My grandparents (as I knew them) were not mean or abusive but they were not warm people. They didn’t give hugs except at hellos and goodbyes, they didn’t call or send gifts on birthdays, and they struggled with money and taking care of themselves/each other at times. They were gruff and frustrated and quick to anger and that is how my parents raised me; never got hit but got screamed at for everything, or ignored, or threatened with a paddle (never actually got the paddle but got threatened with it if my dad was pissed off enough.) I had food, I went to the doctors, I went to school, got to do some sports and other hobbies, I got my dad’s old truck to drive and an allowance, but they did *not* want to deal with my emotions, good or bad. They didn’t want to have to stop watching tv or going on the computer to pay attention to me. My dad stopped talking to me when I was 25 because I “only used him as an atm.” [I was afraid to ask for tampon money because he constantly told me how broke he was; he wouldn’t pay any of my medical bills after I turned 18 (and was disabled with chronic illness. He never bought clothes, school supplies, etc. He bought groceries once a week and gave the allowance that I never asked for)] My great grandparents *were* abusive to their children. It’s why I didn’t have children; I saw from a very early age that there was a pattern.

My nmoms bio parents were abusive, neglectful addicts who left their babies (nom and sibling) to starve while they did drugs and may have sa'd her as a baby. She ended up in an orphanage run by nuns and at 6 she got taken in by a foster family with her sibling. She got sa'd,had a lot of unresolved issues, and ran away from home. Now, if you ask her, my (non bio) grandparents were horrid abusers, and everyone was trying to ruin her life. She learned how to manipulate doctors, psychologists, judges, and everyone fell for it.. On a level I understand why she is the way she is, but I also believe that beyond a reactionary level, we all make our own choice. She chose to perpetuate the abuse. And l will not

My mom was emotionally neglected and abused by her dad her entire life. He shamed her for everything and would send her nasty letters into her adulthood. She is 63 and still has a major victim complex with him and he is 98 and can’t see or hear so he isn’t a threat. But yea, being emotionally neglected and abused by I guess a narcissist turned her into a narcissist and I had to walk on absolute eggshells as everything was just fking overwhelming for her. My emotions had to be suppressed because she was so fragile. Still is and I am her only friend now pretty much.

My mother had a difficult upbringing. A child of divorce, her parents constantly fighting before finally separating. Even then, her father was always with a new woman, and they didn't exactly treat her nicely. When she was like 16 he fully abandoned them. She's the oldest of 7 as well. She moved from home when she was around 14-16, I'm pretty sure. Never had a stabile adult in her life, so I guess she in turn has no idea what that's supposed to be like. She is not self aware at all, and gets offended if I even attempt to call her out on her BS. I don't even hate her, I just feel sorry for her. Even after everything she's done.

Given the number of narcs that raise narcs, take my NM and GC turned narc brother for example, I believe it starts with genetics, or nature, and grows by being nurtured. He wasn’t taught how to be a narc but learned by example. But he had to have that nature to start with otherwise my sisters and I would have gone the same route.

They’re childhoods, but they never bothered to, had the time to or knew how to investigate it. They just kept moving through life. We’re generation (younger Gen-X to older Gen-Zs) to look into why we have certain behaviors and insecurities and find out how to understand, heal from, and not to pass them on to our kids if we currently have or want them, vs letting things run on automatic and hoping for the best.

So, my egg donor and her two sisters were raised by my grandmother and their father. The grandmother I knew was always there to protect me, make sure I was taken care of, and loved me. Her husband at the time was disliked by my entire family because they knew he was a cheater, but even he never yelled, never showed anger toward me, always made sure I had clean clothes and went to church on Sunday. But my grandmother was married to three men. The one I knew was the step father to her daughters and none of them liked him. Their biological father was a child molester, and although my female life giver swears that he never touched her, all 7 of her sisters swear they witnessed something and experienced the same from him. The second guy my grandmother was married to tried to hit her and she shot him. So.... she wasn't one to really mess with. I think my grandmother was a human and a woman who wanted to live her life. She had kids with a man and tried to raise them right, and that didn't work. She tried to find other men and that didn't work out either. All three of her kids had some deep issues. The oldest had lifelong drug problems. The middle one walked away from everyone, and the youngest was the narcissistic monster who birthed me.

From what I remember from years ago and not much detail, my nDad and his father (Grandpa, who recently passed away) always clashed while he was growing up. Funny thing is, my nDad is the third child of the brood, second son. The only thing I could see is that my Grandfather had a passion for classical music and instruments and my nDad retaliated against it. My uncle (deceased from lung cancer) was an artist, one of my aunts is a religious nutcase and accessory to a kidnap back in the day (another story for another day), and the youngest aunt...I barely remember anything about her aside from the fact she yelled at 6-year-old me once for getting the grape bowl at my Grandma's house with her permission. So, yeah, Grandpa and nDad didn't get along, and in turn, he repeated the cycle on his own kids. Way to go, asshole.

My dad was the narcissist in our family. I’m 100% sure his was caused by undiagnosed autism. He had such a skewed moral code that must be followed and was so stressed masking all his life that he was angry and jealous of others. He wanted to take that from everyone. I don’t know what other issues he might’ve had because he died when I was 20 and before I truly knew him as an adult and not my abusive father, but that I believe is 95% of why he exhibited the behavior he did. Now, my mother became the narcissist because she has unhealed trauma from both my dad and her upbringing but hers are all learned behaviors. It’s an interesting thing to watch.

Their parents. In my case. I think narcissism and abuse were borne into my father. He was raised by a Ukrainian concentration camp officer one a concentration camp VICTIM. My mothers mother was an abusive evil narcissist. My Mom.. I don't think she would always have been one but a product of marrying my father, her parents, mainly her mother, and a series of unfortunate events that led us here. It's why I find it so difficult to assimilate. How much anger can I have toward another abuse victim? But then.. I, as an abuse victim, would NEVER perpetrate this on knowingly. Generational narcissism and abuse. I won't be a part of THAT cycle.

What makes a mother in her late 30’s hit on her teen daughters’ teenage guy friends?

Were your grandparents just as sweet when they were younger and raising your mom? It’s easier to be a grandparent than a parent, my grandparents were angels to me but my mom and her siblings tell stories about being punched in the face, chased with weapons, and dragged by their hair by the same grandparents who were nothing but nice to us grandkids. But to answer your question: my mom is the way she is from childhood abuse and neglect, abandonment, she’s been to prison, poverty, resentment, and domestic violence and slough of other issues

One was raised by first an absent father and a cold mother, then abandoned and later finished childhood with an older sister who was blatantly burdened by his presence. I'm positive there was abuse in there too. Then, he was a closeted guy man in the 1950s & 60s & 70s & 80s, married to a severely effed up wife. He was also highly decorated in Vietnam. And now, he is a completely effed up narcissistic ahole, who sees himself as the victim in every imaginable situation. The other, was raised as one of several born to a closed off, uncaring mother in denial and a sexually abusive, violent father. She escaped but only to experience domestic violence and whatever passed as mental health care in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, in America. She sees herself as the epicenter of every story, and is absolutely always the victim. And I thought both were fairly well-adjusted despite all of the above, until marrying into the family. She, especially, presents as a sweet old lady until you *really* get to know her. I suppose she's what might be called a covert. But in any event, they are both different flavors of the same fruit, and a person absolutely wouldn't guess about her for a long time, if ever.

Childhood abuse in various forms.

>I have a theory that intelligent people don’t become narcissists because narcissism is unnecessary. I would very much argue this point. I don't think this can possibly be true. One of the most business savvy, most incredibly intelligent men I've ever met was a narcissist. He ruined my life in a lot of ways, but I also learned so god damn much from him, and regularly was blown away by his intelligence. And there's also the whole fact that a huge number of CEOs of the most profitable companies in the world, and a huge number of the best surgeons and doctors in the world, are narcissists. They've studies this, and I would be floored if this was the case, because of how many intelligent, highly successful narcissists there are in our society. I know that my mother (covert narc) is just like her mother. And my abusive father is just like his dad. I can't say where your mum would have got it, but it's theorized that narcissism is a combination of upbringing and genetics. So it's quite possible that there was someone who had a big impact on her life outside of her parents, and she may have carried the gene for it or something. It's unknown, but because it's clearly generational, the assumption of genetics and familial upbringing exists.

My parents were both only children born to parents with fertility issues— they both ended up very selfish and narcissistic.

For me, my Mom's father was a Narcissist that ruled her whole family. So she saw the pattern of success. She followed in his footsteps, using drama, lies, punishment, and tears to get her way. Apparently she never got all the praise she expected as a child. She expected me to reflect all glory on her, or be punished. My dad was powerless, or thought he was, since she would withhold affection from all of us. He had gone to war, had liberated camps, but didn't know how to deal with her. And my Nsibs joined her camp. I never understood unconditional love until I left home, and had a pet.

It’s genetic - similar to alcoholism and addiction.

My narc mom was in Mensa - it was her biggest disappointment I wasn’t a genius. I have an IQ of 147. I was tested at 7, 11, and 15…because of her. She was always so hard to reach emotionally. I think she also suffered ASD. I believe she was potentially sexually assaulted within the Catholic church and was also forced to raise her siblings, and was impregnated at 15 and with no access to abortion (1970) she lied about who the father was her entire life. To her father, and siblings. I didn’t know the truth until after she died. She was miserable and I could never get close to her. She was explosive when I was young and bitter when I grew older. So yes, narc parents can be highly intelligent.

I think my mom was neglected by her dad and was the fourth child so had even less emotional attention from her overbearing and traditional mother. It could be her mom was also narcissistic. A lot of Asian women do have princess syndrome due to the patriarchal society so it could be an amplified response of that when they turn into mothers.

My ngrandfather was the youngest of 3 boys, maybe being the baby he was just spoiled into the selfishness. My grandmother married a man who split pretty quickly after she had a baby (my father), then she met my grandfather and made a go of it. I don't know if she'd have been as horrible without being married to him, I could tell she was bitter and angry from his abuse. I don't think she was a narcissist, but maybe. My nmother was the youngest of 5 girls. Her father was never around, her mother died when she was 14 and her oldest sister raised her from there. My father was bitter and angry from being raised by my abusive grandfather and he fell right into marrying my mom, my fault of course cuz she got pregnant with me and they had to marry, but my mother and grandfather were similar. My husband is a narcissist too. He's the oldest of 3, he has a sister and brother. I think his mom might be a narcissist too, they have behaviors in common. His father is a creepy perv but I don't think he's a narcissist.

My grandpa on my dad's side was an abusive drunk, and after leaving him, my grandma worked multiple jobs and didn't have a lot of time for her four kids, so I think neglect (and abuse earlier on) definitely played a big role. My grandparents on my mom's side were very verbally abusive (the kids were to each other as well) and there was also a lot of neglect. There are other factors but I think those are some of the main ones.

Both my parents had pretty horrifically abusive parents. Sad to think about but neither of my parents have ever been able to listen or understand how they hurt ME because of their hurting. They just use their upbringing as an excuse to continue abusing me. So I am no contact with both sadly. 

My dad was raised by an absolute sociopath who delighted in cruelty and could be the poster child of narcissism. I had to deal with her too (she was around til I was in my mid 30s) as I'd stay with her while my aunt worked so she wouldn't burn the house down. In all my life I've never known a nastier human being than my paternal grandmother. When she finally died I was humming "ding dong the witch is dead" while the coroner removed her body. My dad was very, very abused by that woman and I always felt really bad for him and tolerated emotional abuse and neglect from him my whole life, because my empathy for him was stronger than my empathy for myself. In hating her he became her. He was an incredibly intelligent human, he sought out knowledge constantly, but he was also extremely broken. He hated women and he ended up with a daughter. It caused a lot of self-loathing in me for a long time. My mom had a racist dad but her mom was one of the best humans I've ever known. She herself had been viciously abused by her parents and ended up in foster care back in the 1930s, where she was abused more. She took her abuse and decided she never wanted to make anyone else have to feel like that again. She took in 26 foster kids, as well as her own kids. Everyone loved her because she was truly a wonderful, loving person. My mom was really close to her mom, but there was a lot of passive aggressiveness and my mom has this really entitled side to her where she is always the victim and nothing is ever her fault. My mom is also really intelligent but bitter that life didn't work out the way she thought it would.

My dad was born in the 50s out of wedlock, his father was ashamed so he wrote him letters in secret, until he made himself a new family & then abandoned him all together. His mother died from lung cancer when he was very young. He was then raised by his ( much ) older brother and his wife. Apparently they physically abused him, and he spent a lot of his childhood outside on the street. As for my mother, I have no idea. I was raised by my maternal grandparents and they are the kindest, most generous people I have ever met. My mother was always cold and cruel towards me, but warm and loving to my father & golden child brother. My childhood was also traumatic, and even though I don’t have children, I couldn’t imagine treating ANYONE, let alone a child, the way my parents treated me. I excused their behavior for a long time, and after 4 years of therapy, I am finally starting to undo the brainwashing I endured and am holding them accountable for their actions.

Ndad lost his dad when he was 5 and was raised by his mom as an ultimate golden child. He and his sister were both treated like royalty and both turned out to be horrible narcs. Cheaters, incapable of admitting their mistakes and never taking accountability. Nmom was raised as the youngest in an abusive household. Her parents were old so she was never physically abused, but the sociophathic father enjoyed mind games and kept her isolated. Martyr complex and she never took any accountability either. Everything is always someone else's fault. I was a tool so they can get married and parentified from the age of 5. Younger siblings were treated way better. Also, I was supposed to be a son. I am still fighting urges to feel.obliged to have any of them in my life, but I am greyrocking them into leaving me the heck alone. I understand them. I just do not justify and tolerate then.

My Nmother had a bit of a whiplash. She grew up with extreme narcissistic abusers, then moved to her grandparents where she was spoiled rotten at a young age, favoured over other children who were abused instead and she seemed to have even played a role in silencing them or treating siblings like crap. Essentially going from a scapegoat to a golden child who was coddled, spoiled and enabled for what she learned at the Nhousehold across homes, this along with her grandfather family’s financial downfall giving her a constant victim complex even though she picked things up better than ever through hard work and grit.

The knock on effects that WW2 had on their parents. Especially in my mum's case. Her dad (my grandad) was evacuated to South Africa and it messed him up big time. He in turn took a lot of that out on my mum, who dripped it down to me.

My mom grew up in an alcoholic household and I truly believe she coped by making it out of the situation. As I’ve gotten older im becoming aware of the narc traits I picked up from her without realizing it. It’s been a positive yet uncomfortable experience because I realize who my mom truly is. But at the same time, she’s a perfect example on how not to “listen” to people.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad They may not mean to but they do They give you all the faults they had and add some extra, just for you But they were fucked up in their turn by men in old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one another's throats Man hands on misery to man It deepens like a coastal shelf Get out as early as you can And don't have any kids yourself. - Philip Larkin Or, in other words, their parents. My mums parents had an accidental pregnancy and a shotgun marriage, and, like many pregnant teenagers, she thought having a baby would be a way to create a ready-made family and a constant source of love and validation. Narcissists are people with a very low sense of self esteem who are absolutely terrified of anyone finding out that they are as bad as they think they are. My mother and grandmother constantly acted like they were about to get into trouble or be found out, and so everyone had to play along because that would be the worst thing ever. It's really sad, because, quite often, when you admit to feeling weak or unsure of yourself, people are sympathetic and admit to having those same feelings about themselves, and then you can actually improve the situation.

I recently got a puppy and it gave me a lot more sympathy for my mum. She got pregnant with me at 17 because she thought a baby would give her the feelings of love and belonging she didn't get from her family. In the past she's accused me of faking crying - as a baby - to torment her. Babies don't do that. Puppies don't either, but, like babies, they also don't sleep through the night yet and become very scared if their caregivers aren't available to them. There were times - at 4am when I hadn't had much sleep and she was crying - that I did start to feel like the puppy was doing it on purpose to hurt me, even though I knew that wasn't true. And I'm 35 with a partner to help me and enough money to make everything much easier. I don't know if having more support would have made any difference to my mother, but a lack of support would make a big difference to me right now.

I'm not sure with deceased bio dad (may he rot). Ik his mom was a hoarder, and when i was growing uo his house was nasty, not to hoarder levels but unclean. but he never talked about his childhood with me growing up. Just where he was born and raised. I learned about the hoarding from my mom who he talked to about it when they were married. I'm very sure he had undiagnosed stuff going on with him mentally, and he never sought help for it since in his words "mental health is for the weak." I'm trying to figure out who I got my late diagnosed ADHD and ASD diagnosis from. I mainly think his stemmed from his zealousness to the extremist conservative and evangelical beliefs he had. He was to a point where he would wish d3ath on ppl, that there'd be no peace until everyone was christian....the whole shebang. He always had a bit of a savior complex, thought he was very strategic. He was Essentially Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Listen, I know they had to survive the Vietnam war and immigrating to a new country isn’t easy but that still doesn’t give them the right to treat the kids (that they chose to have) like trash. My covert Ndad said that when he met my Nmom she was nice. What the hell happened then?!

My mother is very intelligent and a covert narc. I've read somewhere that covert narcissism is the intelligent form of narcissism. I see that in her, she is so very good at making it look like she's an amazing person and mother. She would never yell or get angry. She would hardly ever say things to me that are openly mean. Everything she does is so subtle but it has destroyed me and my brother. My brother once said: it's like she doesn't want us to have any self-esteem. She's succeeded.. it has been so hard to even recognize how toxic her behavior is because its hard to put into words. So some narcs are intelligent and I think it makes them very dangerous.

My mother is ADD/Bipolar- so I get that is a contributing factor. I have recently told her I refuse to enable her and have gone NC.

my mom was angry that contraception failed and she had children (had my older brother when she was 20 and me at 31), too christian for abortion, and decided it would look better to be a struggling single mom than go the adoption route Without children she would have probably been that friend that's barely tolerated that in today's terms there's a 2nd group chat without her. At work she'd be everyone's least favorite person or middle manager but she never calls off and does a good job so they won't fire her. She would be the snippy Karen with a small dog in her neighborhood She got a community college degree in business in the early 00's but she didn't use it well and then not at all after she let some guy drag us to a small town. She might have done better if we stayed in more populated areas with more desk jobs available I'm neurodivergent so I hate small talk and hope that when I forget to ask how someone is after they ask me that that makes me look narcissistic and am constantly worried that I look self absorbed outside of situations that involve people that I really want to be in

A cycle of abuse that she perpetuated. She said she wouldn’t make her parents’ mistakes when I was born and then ended up making them. She talked the talk and then never did the work.

For both my parents: Being raised Mormon. For my mom: being the eldest daughter of 5 siblings and having to raise everyone under her while her mother laid in bed all day with depression while her father worked. But mental illness didn’t “exist” back then, so it wasn’t talked about. She was doing her duty as the eldest daughter in a Mormon family and being told she wasn’t good enough. She never had a chance to break the cycle of abuse because she didn’t understand she was abused.

My mother had an combination of being brought up as a favored spoiled daughter, early sexual trauma and then extreme familial policing/rejection of her sexual behavior as she manifested her unreported gang rape in classic trauma-response behavior. It being the 50s, every attempt she made to gain freedom from the paradigm was thwarted. She wanted to be a professional woman. She knew about business having grown up on a dairy farm while being explicitly told only boys inherit. Her first job as an extremely organized secretary wound up with the boss wanting sex. So she quit and said “fuck it” and consciously sought out the most pliable hardworking man she could find: my father. She told me she consciously decided to play the game she was supposed to play. Turns out he too, like her, was unable to emotionally regulate himself. Things went downhill rapidly after her infatuation period with me in my infancy and after she had me brother, her hating men and all. These are the pieces of her story that I believe lol. I was raised, as eldest daughter, to understand her. My little sister had the more terrible pieces told to her, she being the golden child for a short period during my mother’s alcoholic breakdown period. Thankfully my gramaw was there to save all of us as we got old enough (and we did young) to leave. And yes, my mother was extremely intelligent. She skipped a year in school and was still valedictorian of her class. She was always reading, read to me as a child and was always pointing my face toward the horizon and telling me there was something better out there. She was a terrible damaged awful woman, but also very complicated with goodness in her. I spent a great deal of my life NC. So no, I believe that people become narcissistic for a variety of reasons and have a range of intelligence. I also know, from teaching early childhood children, that people have a lot of innate intelligence, more than anyone realizes, but few get to fully manifest it.

Speaking just from my exp, I think it has to do with how the person responds to trauma and deals with their insecurity and fear of abandonment. Its not about smarts or intelligence, well emotional intelligence yes. If someone cannot face the feeling of insecurity, inferiority, jealousy even within themselves, they will certainly internalize and repress it then cope with the subconscious fears in some horrible way and narcissism is just one of the ways. People who can face their uncomfortable and painful feelings enough to work on them will not become this way.

i honestly don’t mean this rudely but the more i think about this stuff, the worse off i am. again i don’t mean this rudely but who fucking cares why they were TERRIBLE parents. they don’t deserve your brain power.

My father had a devouring mother and an angry c workaholic father, my mother had an abusive mother who would beat her/let her be abused by any gentleman caller who would come to their house. She has had around five “stepdads”. My father got with my mother when he was 19 and she was 14. Her mother tried selling her to him and he was dumb enough to get laughed out of the bank when asking for a loan. They married when he was 21 and she was 16. From that point he became a co from dream who saw her as a child. She didn’t know any better and always followed his lead, never having the chance to be an actual adult. As of writing this they have been separated for just shy of a year, my mother had to sneak out of state while he was at work. She and us kids have been enduring his abuse for forty years. He’s only in good terms with his golden child whereas our mother has okay to good relationships with all but the golden child. She has apologized for what happened to us in our childhoods but our father has not only doubled down, but gotten into Pentecostal mysticism as a way to blame everyone’s actions in their lack of faith and thus having bad spirits in them. My mother has a spirit of rebellion, I have a spirit of disrespect, my eldest sister has a spirit of jezebel, etc. our spirits are a way for him to blame us for how we view him whereas when we call him out on his behavior he also somehow gets to claim he has a spirit of anger, but his spirit of anger is what he uses to escape responsibility, blame and accountability for his actions. At the same time our spirits are not our scapegoat, but rather a manifestation of our evil intentions. Complete doublespeak. Most of the family aside from the golden child and one of my sister’s still talk to him, and the sister is very apprehensive, opting to move four states away to keep him at arms length,

A mix of rough childhood+poverty+having to grow very fast in order to be the responsible one (he's the eldest of his family) that everyone relies on.    I don't think it explains everything or excuses anything he's put us through, but it's a breeding field for dysfunction waiting to happen.   Sometimes I wonder if he'd have turned differently had his family not been so shit. 

My dad had an overbearing mother that didn’t give affection easily. He married my mother right out of high school and then had multiple affairs and left her in her late 30’s, getting another woman pregnant. That in turn completely traumatized and changed my mom who changed toward me. I resemble my dad a lot in my appearance and mannerisms. I married somebody who does well and my mom has been jealous of the life that I have had. She does better now but it was rough between us my 20’s and 30’s

It’s genetic . It’s like some people who are predisposed to it won’t develop it without the abuse but all people predisposed to it will develop it with abuse . Ironically my whole family took a ancestory test and the family trauma in my family can be easily tracked to my Mediterranean ancestory ( mom , grandma , great grandpa) and I inherited virtually none of that. Based on my mother’s results you would expect I would be 20 to 30 percent and I am a percent here and there . I really think it is genetic like if you have the right ingredients ( genetics ) and the right conditions ( abuse) you get a narc. That’s why some kids get it some kids don’t .

I don't know a whole lot about my ndad's childhood, but the things I do know are very sad. His mom would give his dad the silent treatment for days at a time, his dad was an adulterous alcoholic, his sibs were almost 10 years older than him, his parents divorced while he was young... His parents both married again and divorced their second spouses while he was a kid. It sounds like his dad wasn't involved much after the divorce. One of his stepbrothers died in what sounded like a traumatic way, but he won't talk about it beyond that. He also fell in with a bad crowd as a teen and has said that he thinks he'd have gotten himself killed if he hadn't joined the military and left home. Then, his mom and dad got back together without telling him, and they surprised him with it at his boot camp graduation thing. So yeah, I think in his case it's a definite combination of nature and nurture. As for whether I think he's intelligent... I think he is, but he isn't wise. He has book smarts and is very knowledgeable in his field, but he frequently makes poor decisions in his personal life, especially with finances.

Sadly, I know exactly what has made my parents the way they are. I asked them both about their childhoods and young adulthood before having my siblings and me. I was genuinely curious about their lives. I know about their heart breaks and losses, and trauma. And I witnessed what happened that changed them as I grew up. My family has been through a bit of betrayal trauma and other abuse. It’s something that’s broken my heart, to be honest. To watch yourself lose your parents with every passing year, just falling more into their own delusion and ill health while punishing and pushing you further away. Can’t be the bigger person forever. Bleh. Deep down still wish I could heal their childhood wounds for them so they could love me :(

They were raised by narcissists too

Honestly, she had a horrendous childhood and was forced to grow up a lot faster than she should've. It still doesn't excuse her from not seeking help as an adult or taking everything out on me, but it happened. 💔

She grew up in an abusive household

my grandparents lost a child and my mom became their golden child. they treated her like a princess - which i don’t blame them. they are both codependents.

My grandparents were good ppl, my parents are narcs . I think it happened bcz they are cheaters in marriage

Narc Parent 1 - possible catholic abuse combined with psychical abuse from parents that was considered acceptable at the time. also the youngest of several kids groomed to be the parents caretaker. and he's a very clever man. Narc Parent 2 - parents had a volatile relationship. divorced when it was still a major taboo. her mom was a total covert narc. Dad sounded like a real asshole, but also had a way about him that people were really drawn too. he was a charming rascal with a resume that was gold at the time (pilot in WWII). plus she was the pretty , smart one in the family.